Pine nuts are a nutritious snack that can be eaten raw or roasted. They can be added to salads, sprinkled on top of hummus, and blended up as part of pesto and other sauces.
Pine nuts are grown predominantly in the Northern Hemisphere in Asia, Europe, and North America and are also known as pinyon, pignoli, pignolia, pinon, and pignon (1).
Different species, environments, and regions contribute to slight variations in pine nuts’ shape and nutritional composition. Asian pine nuts are short, while European varieties are long and thin (1, 2, 3).
The small, sweet, teardrop-shaped nut comes with a hefty price tag due to the time and labor involved in its harvest.
It can take up to 25 years for pine trees to start producing edible pine nuts and significantly longer for production to reach its peak. Pine nuts then need to be extracted as seeds, and the second shells must be removed before they’re ready to eat (4).
In this article, we go through the 4 impressive health benefits associated with pine nuts, potential risks, and tips on how to include them in your diet.
High blood levels of “bad” cholesterol, or low-density lipoproteins (LDL), may increase the risk of heart disease (5).
Pinolenic acid is a polyunsaturated fatty acid isolated exclusively in pine nut oil (6).
Pinolenic acid may help lower LDL cholesterol levels in the blood. Rat studies have suggested that pinolenic acid causes the liver to take up and metabolize more LDL cholesterol from the blood (7, 8).
The specific...
Read Full Story: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/pine-nuts-benefits
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